Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, is in the United States
this week, but few observers expect an immediate or significant
breakthrough in the stalled peace talks with the Palestinian leadership.

In public, Mr Netanyahu maintains he is committed to the pledge he made
last year, shortly after he formed his right-wing government, to work
towards the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state.

But so far he has proved either unwilling or unable to renew even a
partial freeze on Jewish settlement building in the West Bank -- a key
condition set by Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the Palestinian National
Authority (PNA), for reviving the negotiations.

Most of Mr Netanyahu's cabinet, including Avigdor Lieberman,
his foreign minister, barely conceal their opposition to Palestinian
statehood. Instead, Mr Netanyahu has imposed a precondition of his own:
that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish
people.

A leading analyst of Palestinian politics says the picture is not as bleak for the Palestinians as it might appear.

“In clinging to a vision of Greater Israel, Mr Netanyahu and
the right are fuelling a potentially powerful Palestinian nationalism
that could yet come to crush not only the occupation but Israel's status
as a Jewish state…”

Asad Ghanem, a professor of political science at Haifa University,
predicts Mr Netanyahu and his cabinet will eventually come to rue their
obduracy.

The intransigence and the unabashed espousal of "an ideology of Jewish
supremacy" by Mr Netanyahu and his supporters will lead to the gradual
"reunification" of the Palestinian people, Dr Ghanem said in an
interview.

In clinging to a vision of Greater Israel, Mr Netanyahu and the right
are fuelling a potentially powerful Palestinian nationalism that could
yet come to crush not only the occupation but Israel's status as a
Jewish state, said Dr Ghanem, the author of several books on Palestinian
nationalism.

Dr Ghanem, who belongs to Israel's Palestinian minority, a fifth of the
country's population, noted that the original goal of Israel's founders
was to use a sophisticated version of divide-and-rule to weaken an
emerging Palestinian national movement that opposed Zionism.

The war of 1948 that created Israel led to the first and most
significant division: between the minority of Palestinians who remained
inside the new territory of Israel and the refugees forced outside its
borders, who today are numbered in millions.

Since 1967, Israel has fostered many further splits: between the cities
and rural areas; between the West Bank and Gaza; between East Jerusalem
and the West Bank; between the main rival political movements, Fatah
and Hamas; and between the PNA leadership and the diaspora.

Israel's guiding principle has been to engender discord between
Palestinians by putting the interests of each group into conflict, said
Dr Ghanem. "A feuding Palestinian nation was never likely to be in a
position to run its own affairs."

He is dismissive of plans by Mr Abbas and his prime minister, Salam
Fayyad, to try to revive the Oslo process by bypassing Israel and
seeking the international community's blessing for the establishment of a
Palestinian state next summer.

Palestinian leaders who have pursued statehood, Dr Ghanem added, have done so on terms dictated by Israel.

First the rights of the refugees to be considered part of the
Palestinian nation were sacrificed, then those of the Palestinians
inside Israel. Next parts of East Jerusalem and all of Gaza were
excluded. And now finally, he said, even significant parts of the West
Bank were almost certain to be counted outside a future Palestinian
state.

"The core of the negotiations for Abbas is about ending the occupation,
but he has progressively conceded to Israel its very narrow definition
of what constitutes occupied land. The rights of the refugees and other
Palestinians to be included in the Palestinian nation now exist chiefly
at the level of rhetoric."

The Israeli right's insistence on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a
Jewish state would accelerate the unravelling of Israel's long-term
policy of fragmenting the Palestinian people.

"All Palestinians are affected by such a demand, not just those living
inside Israel. The Palestinian national movement accepted Israel as a
state decades ago but Netanyahu is not satisfied by that.

“…when Palestinians come to realize that they would never be
offered more than a ‘crippled state’ by Israel, the new paradigm would
become ‘one binational, democratic state for all Palestinians and Jews
in historic Palestine’.”

"He wants to reopen the 1948 file," Dr Ghanem said, referring to the
war that established Israel by expelling and dispossessing 80 per cent
of the Palestinian people. "He is provoking the Palestinian national
movement to reassess the accepted two-state model for ending the
conflict."

As fewer and fewer Palestinians cling to the belief that Israel will
ever agree to partition the territory, the physical and ideological
barriers between the Palestinian sub-groups are starting to crumble, he
said.

The separate struggles of the Palestinians -- for civil rights among
Israel's Palestinian minority; for national liberation by those in the
occupied territories; and for the right of return among the diaspora --
were being superseded by "a common fight against the reality of an
ethnic apartheid".

Dr Ghanem added that, when Palestinians come to realize that they would
never be offered more than a "crippled state" by Israel, the new
paradigm would become "one binational, democratic state for all
Palestinians and Jews in historic Palestine".

The different Palestinian factions would eventually merge their
political platforms. The civil rights movement rapidly emerging among
Palestinians inside Israel would then serve to complement the fledgling
anti-apartheid struggle in the occupied territories.

Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, as well as the
millions of refugees, said Dr Ghanem, would one day come to thank Mr
Netanyahu for bringing them together.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi. The version here is published by permission of Jonathan Cook.